Margaret River is a very beautiful place to live. Until fairly recently it was also very isolated. For over 30 years it has attracted its share of surfers, hippies, artists and intellectuals wanting to get away from suburban pressures and distractions.

Over that long period what was essentially a small rural service town servicing a struggling dairying district, played host to growing numbers of artists and craftsmen establishing themselves in the area.

It became a place where the mundane interfaced with the creative arts in a daily basis, where the experience of fine art became immediate, participatory. Families grew up together. ‘Names’ supplemented their income teaching art at the local schools. They worked alongside university students and ordinary farm labourers in the vineyards. They drank together in the local pubs.

The success of the wine industry brought resurgence of the economy and with it a broadly based interest in the work of local artists enabling them a more reasonable livelihood. The ambience of the region thus shifted markedly to provide the experience of exceptional wines and gourmet dining surrounded by fine art, looking out across a stunning landscape.

Correlative development of the tourism industry soon attracted crowds to the area, generating a further problem in managing the task of converting that influx into dollars to underwrite a positive flow-on to the local community.

In meeting that market numbers of studios and galleries opened which interact strongly with the wineries on the one hand and with resident artists on the other.

The experience of visitors to the region is rich and varied, reflecting the twin dynamic of social diversity and artistic innovation fuelled by rapid economic growth that distinguishes the current outlook.

It is exciting that growth in the number of visitors to the region has further coincided with rapid development of the Internet. This further melding of tourism and technology within that mosaic of intense creativity has generated an insistent interface characteristic of the area.

Talking to people about the way they use the new media within this context has revealed clear distinctions being made between fine art, design and technology, and the manifold potentials of digital technology.

Availability of the new facilities has enabled a significant number of established artists within the region to close their own studio galleries and engage clients by appointment only. Control of a web site enables highly selective interaction with the potential client base.

Established artists have also been able to move on from the run of gallery owners adept at diverting enquiries toward the art experience itself, a process generally indispensable in retailing fine art, and publish idiosyncratic material of their own that rather says to the world, ‘this is me myself.’

Glass artist Alan Fox and luthier Scott Wise, for example, both maintain sites on which they include personal philosophy, comment and opinion alongside their curriculum vitae and images of both archival material and work in progress.

Instead of allowing time to be taken up with routine enquiries and having to explain things over the phone, potential clients are referred by an assistant to the web site.

Interest stimulated, as Scott maintains, to do business successfully ‘proper communication must be established’ between the client and the artist. Alan too insists that the ‘established client experience’ is vital in seeing his pieces properly located in their new home.

The desktop browser thus qualifies in this respect as a shop window. Spencer Toogood of Toogood Creative specialises in corporate visual identity, packaging and website design. Graphic design and media production provides further opportunity to generate imagery that profoundly engages the audience and invites them in.

At the other end of the wire however, the mundane framing of fine art pieces by the average video monitor sitting amid the clutter of paperwork, distracted by security paranoia, pop-up windows and spam, the viewer preoccupied at that moment with daily life in any event, disables the context and inhibits the potential for experiencing art beyond its superficial exterior.

Presenting original art digitally to a discerning audience assumes at the very least that the medium itself is appropriately framed within the studio, gallery or theatrical milieu.

 

Margaret River Galleries explicitly maintains public engagement with fine art pieces through their direct gallery experience. Their exhibition material does not lend itself to bar coding and on-line purchasing options suited to routine consumer oriented e-commerce, and here too the move into the virtual gallery space of the Internet merely entices.

The public face of the region itself is managed through the Margaret River Tourism Association and the wineries at one remove, and exploited by a range of vineyard-based galleries, main-street art galleries, and studio galleries bringing the visitor closer to the working artists themselves. Their web sites invite the audience physically into real space, into direct engagement and participation.

As a whole the experience of Margaret River transcends the mundane. The fine art of the region is distinct from the media invoked to promote it. Its exuberance and immediacy among the diverse range of people making up the community makes it difficult to conceive otherwise.

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